This invention relates generally to evaluating quality of video data, and more particularly to determining performance of communication channels, and more particularly to evaluating effects of technical characteristics of a communication channel with user perception of the communication channel's performance.
An increasing number of applications involve video data. In particular, digital television broadcasts, video streaming applications, and real-time audio and video services consume an increasing amount of networking resources. Additionally, numbers of client devices retrieving and presenting data via a network have continued to increase, with an increasing amount of network usage by client devices used to obtain video data. However, when providing video data to client devices, the quality of the video data can be degraded during capturing, compression, transmission, reproduction, and displaying the video data, which impairs perception of the video data by various users.
While subjective experiments allow providers of video data to o assess user perception of video data through express user feedback regarding different video data presented to the user, such subjective experiments are time-consuming to implement. Accordingly, efforts have been made to develop objective quality metrics for video data to predict user perception of video data from characteristics of the video data itself. For example, quality metrics for video data may be determined by comparing the video data originally transmitted form a content provider to the video data displayed by a client device. However, determining objective metrics by comparing presented video data to the transmitted video data require decoding of the originally received video data to identify discrepancies between the transmitted video data and the displayed video data, involving significant integration with the content provider of the video data as well as obtaining access rights to decode the originally received video data.